Bohemian Rhapsody
by defectivebrainstorm
Summary: With the dawn of the rest of their lives looming, the boys take off for one last adventure together on a road trip across the country. Packed to the ass with mishaps, fart jokes, teenage idiocy, bromance and some honest soul searching, only one thing is certain: no matter where they find themselves in the end, this will be a journey the boys will never forget.


Prologue: American Eulogy

**A/N: First time writing for this fandom, so I feel it's only fair to give any readers who are unfamiliar with my style a fair warning. This story is rated a high T for a reason; I'm unflinching in my writing, I swear a blue streak, I'm a pervert and the things that come tumbling out of my head can be occasionally disturbing and may frighten those with a weak constitution. You have been warned. But then, I'm going to assume that since you've wandered into this fandom you are indeed a SP fan, so you're probably used to offensive vulgarity, harsh language and toilet humour. **

**Everybody good? Alright, on with the show.**

_You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are_

_-Joss Whedon _

**x.x.x Kenny x.x.x**

It was Stan's idea.

Now, usually, Stan's ideas have a tendency to make the rest of us nervous. Either he's trying to rally us for some bleeding hearts cause (or, as Kyle refers to them when he's not around, one of his 'Jackin' It Crusades'), or they just plain suck. I can't even think about ziplining without feeling the clutching hand of boredom tightening around my throat and threatening to throttle me.

But this one was a good one. In fact I'd say it was dangerously close to great. The sheer simplicity of it is what gave it its brilliance; I mean it was practically an American tradition. While I'm being honest here, I'll admit that the notion had actually flickered through my mind once or twice too, but I hadn't suggested it because I've learned that once one suggests an idea, they immediately take ownership of it and all the preparation and pitfalls that come with it, and I really can't be arsed with that shit. Much better for someone else to take the responsibility while I just sat back and enjoyed the ride. Besides, it wouldn't really be fair of me to suggest a road trip when I had no vehicle to offer (nor a driver's licence for that matter), little money for supplies and, I'll be the first to admit it, no stellar navigation skills to my name. But hey man, what I lacked in course plotting I made up for in mechanical expertise. Whose got two thumbs and will be all over the first blown tire or overheated engine? This motherfucker!

Anyways, when Stan suggested a cross-country road trip, not only did I let him take credit for the idea with good grace, I immediately jumped up in favour of it. Something along the lines of 'yeaaaaaaah, woooooo, road trip!' like one of those asshats in the movies. It was just one of those things that made immediate and perfect sense, y'know?

I guess I shouldn't be asking 'y'know' without explaining. Come to think of it I should probably start at the beginning, before Stan suggested it and I wooooooed in approval. I guess it started when Kyle got accepted to Yale (yeah, I know, gasp, Jewish kid goes to prestigious Ivy League college, story at eleven!). Although honestly, I think we all started feeling it way before that, probably from the very moment we started our final year at South Park High and realized with equal mixes of dread and excitement that this was it, we were in the home stretch. On the one hand we were within spooging distance of not only finally breaking free of the shackles of public education, but breaking out of our small hick town altogether. On the other hand, it meant that our lives, which had been thus far been twined together tightly like a tangled briar patch, were going to soon spin off in their own new directions. Frankly, this terrible realization scared the shit out of us. I mean, how could we just split up? How could we live on the outside after being so firmly institutionalized within each other? Like, when I think of us, I think of four guys in a chain gang, like in those old timey movies about the Depression (I think I'm getting my prison references mixed up, but you know what I mean). I'm not saying being with the others was like being in jail, hells no. I just mean like, we'd spent the last thirteen odd years all on the same line together, breaking rocks. None of us could move without the others moving with us, or at least, we couldn't move very far, and if we did the others inevitably felt the pull of it. And now we were just supposed to move on and break rocks somewhere else? It was unfathomable, man.

Well, it was to us, anyways. To Kyle's, and to a lesser extent Stan's, parents, it was perfectly, completely normal, one of those hateful, necessary life transitions that they wouldn't shut up about. You gotta take the bad with the good, they'd say; you don't just get to jump into a new life without offering some kind of trade. To go to college, get a job, get a life, you have to swap the meager wares you've collected from the years before. I guess it's kinda like trading in a used car; it's like oh yeah, she won't get me where I need to go anymore and to be honest I think if I keep driving her it might kill me, but man, I'll really miss the way she handled, and that stereo and custom paint job were totally bitchin'. Never be another one like her, no sir. And then bam, you end up with like, a classy little sedan that's good on fuel, and if you're not careful, eventually a minivan.

Christ I keep getting off topic. My mind just does that, pinballs around from subject to subject and I can't help but draw analogies from one thing to another. It helps me understand the world better when I can relate it to something I get. Anyways, mostly because Kyle's parents pushed him to the point he should have been hospitalized from stress, but also in part because Kyle is just one of those people who was meant to be someone (you can tell it just from the way he speaks), Kyle got an early acceptance to Yale. This was a predetermined destiny that had been cast in stone I'm sure from the moment Gerald's little swimmers struggled their way up Sheila's uber tight, bone dry vag (bet you're not gonna get THAT image out of your head anytime soon, are ya?). But, in a spark of typical teenage rebellion that even Kyle, no matter how vehemently he protests he is, is not immune to, Kyle has planned to major in Criminal Psychology and has expressed interest in pursuing a career in the FBI (of course, he hasn't mentioned this to his parents yet). Even if he changes his mind, he's assured Stan and I (we pretended to be interested in this conversation even though it was long winded and contained a lot of words we didn't understand), that he can still get a law degree later and perhaps one day become a supreme court judge, or some shit like that. Kyle is a person of very high morals and he wants very deeply to be involved in putting criminals, whether they be thugs or dirty politicians, where they belong. He doesn't want to be a rent-a-lawyer like his dad, because he doesn't want to sell himself to whatever case pays the most. And really, who can blame him? Who the hell wants to grow up to be like their parents?

Anyways, as happy as we were for Kyle for getting into the big times (even though everyone knew he would), we realized that our fates had been sealed. We could no longer ignore that our friendship as we'd known it all these years now officially had an expiry date; afterwards it was gonna be a whole new carton of milk, and we weren't sure if we were gonna be able to swallow it. Shortly after that Cartman got accepted to some business school out in Texas (if ever there was a state where Eric Cartman belonged, surely thy name was Texas). Originally Stan intended to stay behind for a year, take some time off to collect himself and decide what his next step was. This cheered me up some, because I'd known for most of my life that I sure as hell wasn't going to college and had resigned myself to a lonely fate of pumping gas at the Pump n' Blow. I also thought it'd be good for Stan to just focus on himself for awhile without Wendy, his long time quasi-girlfriend, in the picture. Not that I thought Wendy was bad for him, but she sure took up a lot of his time and over the past few years especially I'd noticed that Stan had sort of started drifting out of touch with himself. I wasn't the only one to think so either. But of course Stan's parents feared that if he didn't jump right into post-secondary he'd lose his drive, and Wendy's parents passive-aggressively implied it made him less of a man for not going to college, and on top of all that Stan also won an athletic scholarship which would definitely take some of the weight off his parent's wallets, who'd already put Shelly through three years of college, so Stan eventually buckled and was accepted at the community college up in Boulder. Peanuts compared to the mighty Kyle Brofloski, but good enough for a kid who had no idea what to do with himself. And so that was that; the dice had been cast and the Fellowship was broken. Or on the cusp of breaking, anyways.

Which brings me to Stan's idea. See, we (meaning Stan, Kyle and I, as our relationship with Cartman had become fair-weather by a very broad stretch of the definition. And yes, that was an intentional fat joke there) were existing in a constant state of borderline hysteria sprinkled heavily with sorrow, although none of us wanted to admit it. Instead we were just trying to cram as much fun into our dwindling days together as possible to ignore the swelling, pulsing balls of bile and razor wire that were nestled in the pits of our guts. The problem was, the closer we got to D-Day, the more intense these nauseating, debilitating feelings of depression only teenagers and artists can understand got. And so was born the unspoken mission; we needed something big, a last huzzah, a hell of a hullabalooza, to give our friendship the mother of all Viking funerals.

Kyle suggested renting a cottage somewhere upstate for a week and just chilling out together. I suggested we take a trip to Mexico and go on the biggest bender of all time (I had a fantasy image of Mexico, which I figured was like a grungier, cheaper Vegas with better food). Stan suggested we buy a pair of pants and share it back and forth throughout the summer, an idea he'd passed on from Wendy as a joke. Kyle and I beat the shit out of him and revoked his Man Card, permanently.

And then, when it seemed all hope was lost and we were to spend our last summer together doing the same old shit in our same old town, Stan, in a desperate attempt to salvage what was left of his shrivelled balls, pulled a miracle out of his ass:

Road trip.

Okay, so it doesn't sound like a miracle. But it was just what we needed to pull us out of our slump. The more we thought about it, the more it became obvious that this was not only _the_ solution, it was the _only_ solution. What better way to bond with your best buddies, share some laughs and squeeze in a few more wild misadventures before we all went our separate ways? Not only that, it'd be like boot camp for Stan and Kyle, get them used to being away from home and at least pretending they were self-reliant. And of course the angle we used to sell the 'rents on the idea (believe it or not _most_ people's parents don't like the thought of their underage sons driving across the country in a car that was older than they were) was that we could take some of Kyle's belongings with us to move into his fancy-shmancy new digs in Connecticut, rather than ship it there. His family had originally intended to fly out there with him before school started, an idea that utterly nauseated him, but after much begging, pleading and even a few underhanded manipulative tricks he no doubt picked up from Cartman over the years (the fatass has his uses), he eventually convinced his parents to let him go on his own. I think what finally made Sheila cave was his argument that while his parents could come out and visit him whenever they wanted, his friends, about to becoming college students rocking the Ramen diet (or just keep on rocking the Ramen diet in my case), couldn't. While Kyle's mother had always stood fast to her belief that studying takes priority over friends and leisure activity, she couldn't deny her biological son one last bonanza with his best buddies. Of course she didn't give up that easily, relentless on her mission to make Kyle miserable; she decided she and Gerald would fly out at the end of September instead, to see how Kyle was doing (i.e. check in on him and make sure he wasn't having too much fun). The woman wasn't going to let her little bird leave the nest without a fight.

Stan's parents were much easier to sway and with the all-clear from the parents (mine hadn't given a shit, no doubt pleased that there'd be one less mouth to feed what with Kevin home from his stint in jail. Still, my mom had expressed mild concern and had told me to be careful out there, which was something) we immediately set our plans in motion. Kyle dove into planning our route with obvious zeal (a task Stan and I were more than happy to let him take charge of) and with our course plotted down to every last pit stop we were able to get a rough estimate on how much money we'd need to get us there and back again. It was a hefty price, especially when Kyle added in an extra figure for 'incidentals' (in my mind that meant booze money) and when I'd looked at the final sum Kyle had drawn up for each of us admittedly I pretty nervous. It was a hell of a lot, especially when you considered most of we'd be literally burning on fuel, and with my parents taking advantage of the fact I'd managed to hold down a job by charging me rent, I was worried I might not be able to pay my fair share of dues. But god help me, I grit my teeth and picked up as many extra shifts as I could at the Pump n' Blow, working so many endless hours I'm sure it was an infraction to labour laws. Or it would have if, y'know, I were working legit. I supplemented my meager earnings with some dirty money I made dealing on the side. Heh, pretty funny when you think about it; I was making extra money under the table while making money under the table. They don't call me the Ghetto Prince for nothin'.

I'd never worked so hard in my life and by the end of it I was so sick of idiot customers yelling at me for gas prices I had no control over I was ready to go fucking postal, but I made it. By the time our deadline rolled around I'd not only reached my quota, I'd also been able to squirrel enough away to give to Karen for school supplies and some new clothes. It'd be a Walmart shopping spree, but hey, we ain't picky. To be honest I felt pretty proud of myself, even though most would consider it a small accomplishment; he might not have much to his sorry name, but Kenny McCormick always comes through.

He also occasionally refers to himself in third person. Makes him feel cool.

And now here we stood, on the brink of our last adventure together. We were blowing the lid off of Neverland and we lost boys were going out in fuckin' style, man. Because this was more than a wild, boys-only road trip across this great land of ours. It was our testament, or maybe even our eulogy; we needed to challenge our friendship outside its home field, to prove to each other, and ourselves, that it would survive the strange new world that lay ahead.


End file.
